"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Clodius' Death as Punishment for Arboricide

In 52 B.C. Milo was charged with murdering Clodius and with other crimes. Cicero, in his speech In Defence of Milo, among other arguments, claimed that Clodius' murder was justified, that it actually benefited the state, and that in committing the murder Milo was merely the human agent of divine vengeance. Clodius' offenses against the gods included cutting down sacred groves to make room for his Alban villa (85, tr. C.D. Yonge):

That result was brought about, O judges, not by human wisdom, nor even by any moderate degree of care on the part of the immortal gods. In truth, those very holy places themselves which beheld that monster fall, appear to have been moved themselves, and to have asserted their rights over him.

I implore you, I call you to witness—you, I say, O you Alban hills and groves, and you, O you altars of the Albans, now overthrown, but nevertheless partners of and equals in honour with the sacred rites of the Roman people,—you, whom that man with headlong insanity, having cut down and destroyed the most holy groves, had overwhelmed with his insane masses of buildings; it was your power then that prevailed, it was the divinity of your altars, the religious reverence due to you, and which he had profaned by every sort of wickedness, that prevailed; and you, too, O sacred Jupiter of Latium, whose lakes and groves and boundaries he had constantly polluted with every sort of abominable wickedness and debauchery, you at last from your high and holy mountain, opened your eyes for the purpose of punishing him; it is to you, to all of you, that those punishments, late indeed, but still just and well deserved, have been made an atonement for his wickedness.